I
HAVE not read the book to which The Observerrefers, and am
inclined to distrust books which are hyped so much
in advance as this one was in the book-selling
trade, months ago already. Adolf Hitler,
being dead, is of course a soft target, and nobody
will be deported or arrested for saying he was
homosexual -- unless of course the homosexual and
lesbian communities take offence at the shoehorning
of this belated newcomer into their ranks. Nor
would I attacah much weight to a blackmail file
assembled by Otto von Lossow, one of
hitler's most implacable enemies in 1923.

I am not an expert on the young Hitler, but I am
on the mature man that he became. I am not
impressed by a book that Hitler's Italian
interpreter Eugen Dollmann is said to have
published in Italy after the war, allegedly
containing the police file. I interviewed Dollmann,
a Munich hotel owner, extensively in the early
1970s, and he never made any such allegation to me.
The CIA file on Dollmann has now been released by
the National Archives, and it reveals that -- like
the infamous Wilhelm Höttl -- Dollmann
was a paid OSS informer and agent after the war; he
revealed to me that the Ciano Diary widely quoted
by conformist historians now was largely faked by
the OSS (there are voluminous files on the diaries
in the still closed papers of Allen Dulles
at Princeton University archives).

It is noteworthy that Hitler preferred to
surround himself with women secretaries at his tea
table in the evenings, when he wanted to relax, at
least one of the four being a considerable beauty
(Gerda Daranowski, who married the air force
general Christian).

There are insider rumours that he had a
long-standing relationship, or infatuation at
least, with Magda Quandt, and persuaded her
to marry the unbecoming Dr Joseph Goebbels
solely in order to ensure that she remained within
his field of view. The wife of Dr Otto
Meissner, President Hindenburg's old
state secretary, told The Stars &
Stripes in September 1945 that Hitler, not
Goebbels, fathered Magda's son Hellmuth. The
son's likeness to Dr Goebbels is however
unmistakable; I think there may however be a weak
case to be made for Hitler having fathered little
Holde Goebbels however.

The
Goebbels diaries give a clear image of Hitler's
sexuality in the 1920s and 1930s. At that time
Hitler frequently had girl friends, to the vexation
of Dr Goebbels who wanted the chief to concentrate
less on what he called skirt-chasing and womanising
and more on politics and seizing power. I published
the relevant excerpts in my biography, Goebbels.
Mastermind of the Third Reich. In
1930 Hitler started an intense relationship with
his only half-willing niece Geli Raubal,
daughter of his sister Angela. Goebbels's diary
shows that he also took a shine to the young Geli,
but rapidly backed off when he realised that she
was already spoken for.

His secretary Christa Schroeder related to me
that according to Emil Maurice, Hitler's
chauffeur (and the first chief of the SS), Hitler
used to send him out to procure women in the 1920s;
and that when Hitler found out that he was having
an affair in 1931 with Geli Raubal, he dismissed
him as chauffeur, and angrily confined his niece to
her room. That was shortly before her suicide in
September 1931 (I discussed her affair with Hitler
with her brother Leo in Linz, Austria, and
he never indicated that there was any abnormality
about it). He carried the gun with which she shot
herself until he himself held it to his head in one
hand in 1945 (but actually shot himself with the
gun in his other hand, the Walther 7.65). Ever
afterwards, he compared each new woman he met to
the lost Geli, and did not hesitate to tell them
so, either.

Hitler joked to the sculptor Arno Breker,
so Breker told me, that he liked to visit his
studios, as this was the only occasion when he
might hope to glimpse the nude female form. He
certainly had an eye for the good looking female:
Leni Riefenstahl was one example, whom he
repeatedly invited to tea, according to the
Goebbels diaries; Anni Brandt, wife of Dr Karl
Brandt, his surgeon, was another. So was
Heli Bouhler, and the stunningly beautiful
first wife of labour chief Dr Robert Ley, a
blonde who killed herself in 1940.

On March 24, 1938, when Karl Jesco von
Puttkamer, his perennial naval adjutant, asked
him as his supreme commander for permission to
become engaged (as was the custom then), Hitler
sighed and said that Puttkamer had it good,
becoming engaged, and how much he too would like to
take a wife, but that would be wrong for Germany.
He was thinking of the effect on the female
electorate (I know the date, because I told
Puttkamer, when he related this to me, "That was
the day I was born, Herr Konteradmiral!")

Women who have read Hitler's Table Talk
-- the first-person record of his private
conversations with his staff -- have told me that
they marvelled at his insight into the female
psyche. With the exception perhaps of Winifred
Wagner, who was English, and of whom (so she
told me) he was genuinely fond, he took pains to
avoid the battle-axe variety of the German female;
he told his staff he could not abide Ilse
Hess, wife of Rudolf, after she turned
into a virago in later years. I believe Hess's
attorney Alfred Seidl related that to
me.

His testosterone level measured only about half
the normal for a man of his age, but Dr Cortez F
Enloe, who investigated and questioned Hitler's
doctors in 1945 for the USSBS, told me in
Washington DC in the 1960s that (a) the measuring
abilities of serum and hormone levels was not
precise enough in the 1940s for an accurate
determination; and a low level, if correctly
measured, would be a normal characteristic of a
busy man who had no time or opportunity for a
prolonged sexual relationship, e.g. an
industrialist or a convict.

Eva
Braun

Pictures
from a roll of film found in the ruins of
the Berghof in 1945 (from this website's
archives)

There is a 1945 US interrogation report summary
devoted to the subject of Women around Hitler, and
there is no hint of homosexual proclivities in
this. Nor is there in the diaries
of his doctors, Karl von Eicken and
Theo Morell, which I was the first to find,
transcribe, exploit, and publish; nor in the
500-page diary of Dr. Erwin Giesing, who
treated him after the July 20, 1944 bomb attempt on
his life. Nor in the interrogations of the other
doctors like Hanskarl von Hasselbach. Nor is
there a hint of this in any of the otherwise often
scurrilous reports on public opinion, the morale
reports prepared by the SD (Gestapo).

Christa Schroeder told me that when she was ill
in 1938, Hitler visited her in hospital with
flowers; he joked with her flirtatiously, "People
will say you're my secret mistress." She was
shocked at what she took to be a shy advance.

SS General Sepp Dietrich once spread the
rumour that Hitler had found the beautiful baroness
Sigrid von Laffert in his bed, naked, in the
Chancellery; he had brusquely told her to get
dressed and remove her person from his presence.
Reinhard Spitzy, a close friend of the
baroness, assured me this was completely untrue,
but she certainly continued to grace the Berghof
tea parties until 1935, when young Eva
Braun finally took over and secured
Sigrid's banishment from the court (by staging a
fake suicide: see her personally faked May 1935
diary, in the US National Archives, for this
episode).

In 1935 he started a long lasting relationship
with this attractive, simple young laboratory
assistant (she worked at Heinrich Hoffmann's
photo studios); in fact he continued thereafter to
pay her salary until the end of World War II
(Gerd Heidemann showed me the Hoffmann
Studios receipts for these payments). I discussed
the matter of Hitler's relations with her, with
Otto Günsche (who is still alive in
2001) and with Nicolaus von Below, his SS
and Luftwaffe adjutants respectively (that was
around 1967-9). While tact constrained what they
were prepared to divulge, they both indicated that
the sexual relationship between Adolf and Eva was
infrequent but normal, and that they had specific
reasons for that belief. Her bosom friend Herta
Schneider confirmed this to me when I
ninterviewed her on film for Hard Copy in
the 1980s.

No doubt we shall be told by the next conformist
scholar that he did not just like children and
dogs, but that he was a paedophile.